Hydrophilic Interaction Liquid Chromatography (HILIC): Latest Applications in the Pharmaceutical Researches

Abstract

Background: Significant advances have been occurred in analytical research since the 1970s by liquid chromatography (LC) as the separation method. Reverse phase liquid chromatography (RPLC) method, using hydrophobic stationary phases and polar mobile phases is the most commonly used chromatographic method. However, it is difficult to analyze some polar compounds with this method. Another separation method, normal phase liquid chromatography (NPLC), which involves polar stationary phases with organic eluents. NPLC presents low-efficiency separations and asymmetric chromatographic peak shapes when analyzing polar compounds. Hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) is an interesting and promising alternative method for the analysis of polar compounds. HILIC is be defined a separation method which combines stationary phases used in the NPLC method and mobile phases used in RPLC method. HILIC can be successfully applied to all types of liquid chromatographic separations such as pharmaceutical compounds, small molecules, metabolites, drugs of abuse, carbohydrates, toxins, oligosaccharides, peptides, amino acids and proteins. Objective: This paper provides a general overview of the recent application of HILIC in the pharmaceutical research in the different sample matrices such as pharmaceutical dosage form, plasma, serum, environmental samples, animal origin samples, plant origin samples, etc. Also, this review focuses on the most recent and selected papers in the drug research from 2009 to submission date in 2020 dealing with the analysis of different components using HILIC. Results and Conclusion: The literature survey showed that HILIC applications are increasing every year in pharmaceutical research. It was found that HILIC allows simultaneous analysis of many compounds using different detectors.

A survey of polar stationary phases for hydrophilic interaction chromatography and recent progress in understanding retention and selectivity

“…The separation of small polar compounds in biomedical and pharmaceutical analyses (e.g., polar drugs, metabolites, nucleosides, sugars) using reversed‐phase liquid chromatography (RPLC) is very challenging due to the lack of sufficient retention but has been very successful using hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC). In the past two decades, HILIC has gained widespread attention, especially in the areas of biomedical and pharmaceutical analyses (Erkmen et al, 2021; Goyon et al, 2020; Suttapitugsakul et al, 2020; Teleki & Takors, 2019). A literature search in SciFinder reveals that the number of published articles related to HILIC increased drastically between 2005 and 2020, reaching more than 400 papers per year since 2015, as shown in Figure 1 (data for 2021 is not complete).…”